The BEST day

Sydney, age 9.

FACT: Halloween is the best holiday.

1) Halloween is secular. It transcends traditional cultural boundaries and brings groups of people together that typically may celebrate apart. Further, no matter who you are, this holiday offers equal-opportunity fun. I’ll never forget living in married student housing at U.C. Davis, and witnessing the sheer joy of the international students AND their kids experiencing trick-or-treating for the first time. Dress in silly clothes, go house to house and get free candy? How crazy cool is that?

2) Halloween a holiday over which kids actually have some control. Christmases and birthdays and other gift-receiving holidays may focus in part on kids, but from the food to the decor to the timing of everything — adults tend to plan it all. But Halloween? KIDS get to decide their fate, from what is worn to how the evening spent — what paths to take while trick-or-treating, who to go with, whether to carry a plastic bag or a pillow case… (SIDE NOTE: Always a pillow case. Size and durability win every time.) And as you age, your inner kid is always welcome.

3) On Halloween, the focus is on fun. You dress up, you act silly, you eat a ton of sugar, you spend an evening laughing and inevitably talking to neighbors you otherwise ignore. And invariably, you come away with stories.

THE BEST stories. Everyone has a Halloween story. In fact, most people have a good 4 or 5 really GOOD Halloween stories.

So let’s share them:

One quick one: One year I went as a stick of Wrigley’s Double Mint gum. There was no bending, no sitting, hardly any movement– as I was wearing a giant box that my genius invented and my mother then came up with the creative awesome to pull off. I remember she used green shelf contact paper to color the box green and she cut each letter out and stuck it on the box. It was perfect. Except for the zero ability to move part.

Responses to "The BEST day"

I was a penny one year. I have no idea why, but it’s what I wanted to be. Like your Wrigley’s gum, I couldn’t bend either. My mom me a sandwich board style thing with two huge pennies drawn on it. I remember somebody had steps going up to their house and that was a problem in that costume.

My best memory of Halloween is my Mom always wanting to give kids the best — and biggest — chocolate bars.
Back then, you could buy Hershey’s chocolate bars for 5 cents or 10 cents. Mom always gave the 10-cent bars. Kids used to return two or three times. OK for Mom!

I always think I hate Halloween, but that’s mostly because I’ve never had a really good costume and I’m also sad about it. When I think about it though, I’ve had some cool Halloweens.

For instance: The year my friends decided to have a haunted house and I almost burned to death while pretending to be hanged in a tree. There were candles involved and gasoline somehow. We were dumb and in high school, what can I say? My memory of it plays our like a episode of Rescue 911, though I think we were able to put out the fire before any professionals were called. I was also probably not in any real danger.

Or: My friend’s Halloween wedding. As a groomsman, I got to wear a cape and vampire teeth. The groom’s mother was a zombie nun. The couple had their own comic book made up. It was a play off Tales from the Crypt called “Tales from the Whipped” — because your whipped when you get married, I guess.

Or: Seeing the Cramps at the Fillmore in San Francisco. They used to do an annual Halloween show. This would have been the late 1990s. The Bomboras opened the show dressed in black-light skeleton outfits. The singer hanged himself.

Lux Interior was dressed in a leotard. His two front teeth were silver. He smashed a wine bottle and cut himself and slithered around and it was the scariest awesomest thing ever.